3 Reasons People Die When Loved Ones Briefly Leave the Room

Helping to understand the reason your loved one died while you were out of the room or en route to be with them.

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Many people have shared with me their frustration for missing their loved one’s passing. Perhaps this happened to you. You left the hospital room to visit the cafeteria, and your loved one died while you were gone. In other cases, people have flown a thousand miles to see their dying loved one and were driving to the hospital from the airport when their loved one passed. These scenarios can elicit a lot of frustrated and confused emotions.

It can be very difficult for surviving family members and friends to understand why their loved ones died alone. They wanted to be there for them as they transitioned, yet they missed their passing by minutes. This can also lead people to feel regret or guilt that they lost the opportunity to be with their loved one as they passed, which is why I’ve written this article. As we know, a little added understanding can provide a great deal of comfort.

Below are the three reasons people die when their loved ones briefly leave the room (or shortly before they arrive), which I believe will offer some peace to those who may have felt hurt or slighted by this all-too-common occurrence.

My investigation of life after death has led me to understand that dying isn’t always a conscious decision. There are other factors involved, which I wrote about last week in my article: The 5 Key Factors That Determine How and When We Die. With those factors now under our belt, here are the three common reasons souls choose to die while loved ones are not present.

First Reason: Holding Onto Life for Others

Our soul, which is that part of us that remains in the spirit world while our spirit inhabits a physical body, ultimately decides our time of death. So, for instance, if a person’s soul knows that she is more likely to hang on to life and resist crossing over into the afterlife while loved ones are in the room with her, that soul may influence death while those loved ones have temporarily left the room (perhaps to go eat or talk to the doctor) or before those loved ones arrive in the first place.

It's important to understand that this occurrence isn’t a statement about you or anyone else who wanted to support the dying person. It’s more about the person preparing to go home to the spirit world. It’s also important to understand that, in this situation, this decision is made by the soul of the dying person, not the human being herself. So if you suspect your mother was trying to stick it to you one last time while you were out of the room, it’s probably not the case.

Second Reason: Not Emotionally Prepared for Death

Alternatively, if one’s soul knows that a family member is not emotionally equipped to be present at the time of their death, the soul will influence death when that family member has left the room (or before that family member arrives)—possibly in cooperation with that family member’s spirit guides.

In this case, the reason for the timing of the death is for the benefit of someone who might be traumatized by being in the room when their loved one dies. It’s not a negative statement about that person. The fact is that few of us are prepared for death as we’re growing up. Here in the United States, for example, most parents procrastinate talking to their children about death due to not understanding the subject themselves. While certain cultures are much better at discussing death and dying than others, this is certainly an area where we can improve.

Third Reason: It’s My Party and I’ll Die When I Want To

Soul decisions aside, dying alone can also be an intentional act of free will on the part of the dying person—the human being. If you read last week’s article, you’ll recall how powerful free will can be in reference to dying.

There are many people who, for the sake of pride and dignity, prefer to die alone. There are all sorts of involuntary bodily functions that can occur at death, and the mere thought of them might seem embarrassing to a dying person. Free will gives the person the choice of protecting their dignity even if it wouldn’t be an issue with the surviving loved ones who are present.

Also in reference to free will, the dying person might think it’s best for their loved ones to not be in the room when they die, even if those loved ones wouldn’t agree. In these cases, the dying person is exercising his own free will to determine his time of death. And it’s important that we respect the person’s final choice with grace as it might have been his last act of free will.

The Big Picture

Not being present with your loved one when they pass is often a confusing and sometimes maddening occurrence to people in grief. What’s important to remember is that the second our loved ones cross over from the physical to the spiritual dimension, they’re acutely aware of how much we love them, that we wanted to be with them, and that we were trying to get there in time (or we only left the room for a moment).

One could argue that even if they have this awareness that we were there for them once in spirit, they didn’t know it when they were alive. However, it’s the same consciousness in the physical body that returns to the spirit world after death, so it’s the same person who gains this awareness about your love and intentions. It’s easy to think the living person is different from the spirit of that person after death, but mediumship and near-death experiences indicate that the personality is the same.

It might help to keep in mind that some people are not able to visit their loved one prior to death. Even if the dying person asked to see that person shortly before dying, the awareness that comes once the spirit has left the body provides that spirit with an understanding of how much the person loved them and why they were unable to visit prior to death. There’s no reason to feel guilty or regretful, because your loved one in spirit now has complete clarity of your love for them, which is ultimately all that matters.

I think it’s also helpful to remind ourselves that no one is alone when they die. My article on deathbed visions illustrates this best. The evidence of deathbed visions informs us that spirits are visiting people who are dying prior to their death. This includes deceased loved ones, including pets, who visit the dying to let them know they’re waiting to welcome them home.

You might think to yourself, but my loved one didn’t have a deathbed vision. But not everyone who sees spirits before dying shares it with anyone. There are many possible reasons for not telling anyone, the main one being fear that no one will believe them. Worse, some people might think they’re hallucinating. Even if they weren’t the type to keep a deathbed vision to themselves, sometimes people are unable to talk, for instance, if they’re on a ventilator, too weak to communicate, or hopped up on morphine.

There is also a great deal of evidence from mediums, after-death communications (including dream visitations), and near-death experiences that the spirit of human beings often leaves the body prior to death. This is just another phenomenon to keep in mind in reference to this subject.

This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens more often than you might think. Since the purpose of life is to have experiences that can only be known in physical form, including both positive and negative experiences, our soul might not recognize any benefit from going through a particular dying experience. While our own personal free will does play a large part in how we die, it is our soul that ultimately decides when to pull our spirit out of our body during a natural death. And when the spirit leaves, the suffering stops.

Many people in spirit have communicated through mediums that their spirit left their body before the airplane or automobile crashed, before the bullet hit their body, or before the pain of any death experience got unbearable. When this occurs, we experience our death while out of our body yet we are still connected to it spiritually. Many people who have had near-death experiences have also said that they left their body seconds before the physical impact of whatever nearly killed them.

Many of us have been in the room with a dying person and noticed that despite their body still being alive, they didn’t seem present. In some cases, their consciousness already left the body. There’s evidence that people do this while in comas. In fact, I know of gifted people who have communicated with the consciousness of comatose patients, and the information they obtained was clear and accurate—information the person channeling could not possibly know if not communicating with the patient.

In conclusion, I repeat what I wrote about in my last article about dying: “...there is an infinite intelligence to the process [of dying] that makes sense in the afterlife even if it makes no sense to us here in the physical dimension. I guess this is what people refer to as having faith—having faith that there’s a higher intelligence at work on our behalf even if we don’t understand it.”

On that note, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason your loved one died while you were out of the room was not an accident or poor timing. There’s a reason these things happen, even if we’re not privy to the purpose. Because our souls have infinite intelligence, we must trust that it happened for someone’s benefit and not feel hurt or cheated by the timing of it.

I often compare the work of our souls to the choices made by parents of a young child. Parents make all sorts of choices for the health, safety, or long-term benefit of their children that the kids don’t understand. And, in many cases, the children wouldn’t understand it if the parents explained it. That’s our relationship with our souls in a nutshell.

I hope this article was helpful to you in some way. I appreciate you reading it, and I’d love to hear your comments.

Warmly,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the top directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His newest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.

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